Monday, January 09, 2006

Although she has lived in Boston, Morocco & even right here in Tredyffrin Township, Chester County, PA, everything on the back cover of Ange Mlinko’sStarred Wirehollers “New Yawk School, New Yawk School” virtually at the top of its lungs. There are blurbs from John Ashbery & Charles North, and then this from Bob Holman, impresario of the Bowery Poetry Club, who picked Mlinko’s effort for the National Poetry Series, published by Coffee House Press:

If the U.S. had sent this many troops into Iraq, we wouldn’t be dealing with an insurgency now. The funny thing about all this blessed-by-association overkill is that it’s more or less true – if you like the poetry of the New YorkSchool, you’re going to feel completely at home with Ange Mlinko. Yet what’s really interesting in this superb little book are all the ways in which this isn’t the case, or at least isn’t the point at all. Here is one example, a poem whose title takes up two lines:

Three Crickets.
The Blind Cricket.
When the chirping of the males rises to a furor,
charged particles accumulate in the gut – duodenum, say
due to internal cracks caused by déformation professionel:
rubbing wings in an ecclesiastical mode while flexing
the opaque, muscular, contracile diaphragm.

It enters houses, lighter and more graceful,
though it knows not exactly how it accesses its gift
suspended in aqueous humor then thrown out on its ear
like rain bounced off a small false roof
over the spiral volutes of its capitals.

Whether or not this poem reminds you of the NY School seems to me largely irrelevant to what makes it an excellent poem (&, in any event, there are other works in Starred Wire that wear that particular tattoo far more visibly). These are, as I see it, four things:

an eye for the particular – there is nothing vague here, the details are a delight

a rich ear for language itself, which comes out in some fabulously physical vocabulary – this poem is a trip to read aloud

an accomplished sense of form: twin five-line sentences with no sense of padding at all

a gestalt of personality projected through the poem that comes out in all of Mlinko’s work: smart, funny, articulate, self-confident.

Somebody somewhere is going to want to call that last item “voice.” More accurately, tho, it reminds me of Peter Yates’ definition of “content” in music as “aesthetic consistency.” There are tonal elements in Mlinko’s writing that show so constantly that the reader watches for them & feels rewarded when they arrive – like understanding the importance of the adjective false right at that spot in the next to last line, both echoing the al in small & setting up the run of l sounds that thread through the p & t consonants of the last line. That false is the sort of detail that Mlinko gets right consistently throughout this book. Does this have anything to do with “voice” in the sense of Mlinko having a recognizable persona in her work? I think pretty obviously the answer is no, just as it is no indication of her regional accent.

So what makes this poem shine – I think it may be my favorite here, tho frankly I have several – has little to do with the poem’s allegiance to a particular heritage or to any sense of the poet’s voice. In some sense, it has most to do with poetry’s equivalent of Occam’s Razor – Mlinko makes the complex appear completely straightforward. It’s a demonstration of Pound’s dictum of dichtung = condensare at its finest.

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Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Revelator from BookThug, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 14 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize,from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. In 2015, Silliman taught at Haverford College & theUniversity of Pennsylvania & was writer in residenceat the Gloucester Writers Center.